On Saturday, a YouTube creator called ChromaLock published a video detailing how he modified a Texas Instruments TI-84 graphing calculator to connect to the internet and access OpenAI's ChatGPT, potentially enabling students to cheat on tests. The video, titled "I Made the Ultimate Cheating Device," demonstrates a custom hardware modification that allows users of the graphing calculator to type in problems sent to ChatGPT using the keypad and receive live responses on the screen. ChromaLock began by exploring the calculator's link port, typically used for transferring educational programs between devices. He then designed a custom circuit board he calls "TI-32" that incorporates a tiny Wi-Fi-enabled microcontroller, the Seed Studio ESP32-C3 (which costs about 5), along with other components to interface with the calculator's systems. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more.

OpenAI could undergo massive changes next year, which include getting a brand new logo. According to Fortune, though, staff members were less than enthused when they got a sneak peek of its supposed new logo at a recent company-wide meeting. The company's hexagonal flower symbol, which has become pretty recognizable thanks to ChatGPT's popularity, is gone. Instead, it's replaced by a large black "O" or a simple ring or circle that staffers reportedly found to be devoid of creativity -- ominous, even. Based on how the publication's sources described it, the new logo sounds like the complete opposite of OpenAI's current one, which was designed to represent "precision, potential and optimism."

It used to go by at least two different names -- Oculus Connect and then Facebook Connect -- but whatever the moniker, Meta's fall event is still a big showcase for the company's latest and greatest achievements in the virtual reality and mixed reality space. Much like last year, we can likely predict the biggest news coming out of Meta Connect 2024 with just two acronyms: AI and AR. Like every other big tech firm this year, Meta will be desperate to demonstrate how it plans to stay relevant in a future powered by AI. And now that we're seven months beyond the launch of Apple's Vision Pro, which arrived alongside a short-lived spike in interest in augmented reality (AR), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is likely eager to show off his own plans to make AR a reality. While Zuckerberg isn't as hot on the metaverse as he was when he renamed his company, the union of AI and AR is one way he can still make the dream of persistent virtual worlds come true.

When the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania was decommissioned in 2019, it heralded the symbolic end of America's nuclear industry. In 1979, the facility was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in the nation's history: a partial reactor meltdown that didn't release enough radiation to cause detectable harm to people nearby, but still turned Americans against nuclear power and prompted a host of regulations that functionally killed most nuclear build-out for decades. Many existing plants stayed online, but 40 years later, Three Mile Island joined a wave of facilities that shut down because of financial hurdles and competition from cheap natural gas, closures that cast doubt over the future of nuclear power in the United States. Now Three Mile Island is coming back, this time as part of efforts to meet the enormous electricity demands of generative AI. The plant's owner, Constellation Energy, announced yesterday that it is reopening the facility.

Power-hungry generative AI models are quickly making Big Tech sizable energy requirements even more demanding and forcing companies to seek out energy from unlikely places. While Meta and Google are exploring modern geothermal tech and other newer experimental energy sources, Microsoft is stepping back in time. This week, the company signed a 20-year-deal to source energy from the storied Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania, a site once known for the worst reactor accident in US history. If successful, the effort would breathe life back into the iconic symbol of US nuclear power and potentially provide Microsoft with around 800 megawatts of clean-burning energy to help satiate its growing energy appetite. "This agreement is a major milestone in Microsoft's efforts to help decarbonize the grid in support of our commitment to become carbon negative," Microsoft VP of Energy Bobby Hollis, said in a statement.

We're still a few weeks away from the official kickoff of Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days event, but that doesn't mean you need to wait around. Amazon is well-known for many things, but today's deal combines a couple of our favorites: smart home tech and serious savings. As of Sept. 20, take 33% off several Amazon Echo devices ahead of the retailer's Prime Big Deal Days sale on Oct. 8 and 9. Amazon devices are one of Mashable's top recommendations for items to buy during the sale (and check out what not to buy, too, to avoid disappointment). Here are some of our favorite choices if you're shopping Echo devices. If you're interested in a smart display, the Amazon Echo Show 8 is a great option that offers tons of features.

Welcome to ZDNET's Innovation Index, which identifies the most innovative developments in tech from the past week and ranks the top four, based on votes from our panel of editors and experts. Our mission is to help you identify the trends that will have the biggest impact on the future. In first place this week is brain-computer interface company Synchron for allowing Amazon Alexa's network of home devices to be controlled by a user's thoughts. The development comes just a few weeks after the company announced a similar capability for Apple Vision Pro. With the help of Synchron's brain implant, a person with ALS directed Alexa by guiding a cursor using his thoughts instead of his voice or touch, one of which is commonly required to use most consumer tech, including home systems.

The picture on the left was generated by a standard method while the picture on the right was generated by ElasticDiffusion. The prompt for both images was, "Photo of an athlete cat explaining its latest scandal at a press conference to journalists." Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has notoriously struggled to create consistent images, often getting details like fingers and facial symmetry wrong. Moreover, these models can completely fail when prompted to generate images at different image sizes and resolutions. Rice University computer scientists' new method of generating images with pre-trained diffusion models a class of generative AI models that "learn" by adding layer after layer of random noise to the images they are trained on and then generate new images by removing the added noise could help correct such issues.

Welcome to ZDNET's Innovation Index, which identifies the most innovative developments in tech from the past week and ranks the top four, based on votes from our panel of editors and experts. Our mission is to help you identify the trends that will have the biggest impact on the future. Google's annual Made by Google product event dominates this week's Index, but its success also caused some disagreement within ZDNET's panel of voters. In first place this week is brain-computer interface company Synchron for allowing Amazon Alexa's network of home devices to be controlled by a user's thoughts. The development comes just a few weeks after the company announced a similar capability for Apple Vision Pro.

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